The modus vivendi of this blog is plainly self explanatory. Pathetically,'progressives' regularly promote implausable, impractical or plainly asinine ideas. Who but socialists could for decades abuse the term 'economic rationalism' - without humiliation? THIS GOES TO THE VERY HEART OF ECONOMIC POLICY AND RATIONAL GOVERNMENT: TO WIT TO NOT CRITICIZE THE CONSERVATIVES AS BEING 'RATIONAL'!
My other main blog:
mediaspinners.blogspot.com.au
Geoff Seidner

Monday, 28 January 2013

GREAT CATALAXY!! [AND IPA]

Daily I receive brilliant items from CATALAXY: this is merely one!Explore the links.

Sinclair Davidson posted: "[This post
is taken from the IPA and Mannkal Economic Education Foundation's Foundations of
Western Civilisation Program. It is very good and deserves wide exposure.]
Almost every civilisation has had slavery at one time in their past. Two recent,
and ve"

Almost
every civilisation has had slavery at one time in their past. Two recent, and
very different movies concern its abolition in the United States: Steven
Spielberg’s Lincoln and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.

Spielberg’s
film depicts Abraham Lincoln’s struggle during the Civil War to secure passage
of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. Tarantino’s film is set
three years before the start of the war, and concerns a freed slave trying to
liberate his wife from a plantation. Here’s an interesting piece from George
Mason University’s History News Network on what both films say about slavery and the law.

But
there remains a story to be told about slavery: how liberal economists fought
slavery in Britain.

One
common nickname for economics is “the dismal science”. Few people know that the
dismal science was dismal because it assumed that all people – of all races –
were equal.

Adam
Smith wrote in his Wealth of Nations that “The difference
between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common
street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature as from
habit, custom, and education.”

But
to the English writer and proto-socialist Thomas Carlyle this meant economics
was a dismal science. He found there was something “dreary, desolate … quite
abject and distressing” about a discipline that advocated all humans be treated
as if they were the same.